Heterotopias: Other Spaces or the Other of the Space?

Abstract

The concept of heterotopias that Michel Foucault develops in the short text Of Other Spaces provides us with a productive basis for a contemporary analysis of space as an order which, in the intent of its homogenization, uses the principal of the exclusion of heterogeneousness. For Foucault this heterogeneousness finds its place in other spaces, which are materialized in some other places limited with state borders, walls of institutions, fences. So the question arises of how to think heterotopias today, when the geographical, material, and architectural boundary lines are becoming less and less relevant, and therefore the topological conception of heterotopias is no longer adequate. On the basis of Michel de Certeau’s analysis of everyday life, we can develop the concept of heterotopias without their spatial materialization or localization; heterotopias which are not other spaces but rather the other of the space. Thus the heterotopias are thought of as what is crumbled and dispersed in time, what springs up always anew when the dislodged heterogeneousness tactically catches the right moment and sets itself against the apparently homogenized space.